Houston, We Have a Problem

This is our post from yesterday May 20th while in transit, we would write one for today, but we are quite tired and need to be ready to head to the airport to fly to the Galapagos at 6am, which is rough for college students.

Today is our first day out! The title of this blog post might be misleading because there haven’t really been major problems. To start the day off, we had to be on campus by 4AM. After a couple full weeks of severe senioritis, this was a bit difficult for many of us. Once the bags and people were loaded in, the van decided it was tired as well and needed a jolt. Luckily for us, the night-shift security was happy to provide a jump.

For a few of us, it was the last time we would be in Maine for a while. A little bittersweet as we crossed over into New Hampshire. Going through Boston security wasn’t bad at all. It was actually a little funny watching Dr. Ono being stopped for a random explosive search. Of course she was innocent.

Onto the first plane! I personally don’t remember much other than stewards asking if I want a drink, dramamine affects me like that. A little turbulence at the end but we landed safely in Houston around noon (EST). Now the wait.

A five hour layover can make for some interesting happenings. First: lunch. If you aren’t familiar, the Houston airport is pretty large. Our terminal has about 5000 places to eat and, of course, a lot of us picked the Panda Express. It definitely wasn’t the best Chinese but what can you do? We then sat through a 30 minute lesson of Julian (the one who has a degree in film) teaching Royale how to use her new Nikon D3100. I think we all took something away from the lesson like what a RAW image is and to never trust your camera. Julian then proceeded to buy freeze-dried ice cream from the “Space Corner.”

After all of the grand times in Texas, including multiple moving sidewalk rides, we then boarded our flight for Ecuador. We got to our hotel high up in the Andes around midnight, and went right to bed. Mostly everyone slept well, however there have been some rather intense altitude dreams (since we are at 9300 ft).

In other news, Julian discovered how delicious a Frosty-dipped french-fry is.